NYC - THROB!

Tuesday, Manhattan,10:20 pm. Who cares? 

I'm over it. Yeah, the place throbs hot 24/7. So do a lot of cities. But frankly NYC's showing darkening age lines. Much of the skyline's a backdrop for Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin imagined that haunting piece in 1924. 

The British novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

New York's like that - a visit to the 20s. Not as high as other cities anymore... neither in buildings nor creativity. It's not as clean as other places... neither in in streets nor imagination. It's a city of scuffed shoes, frayed collars, cheap-suited-babble, and crumbling pretensions. A narrative about hardscrapple romantics held up between bookends of homeless and trust bunnies. 

They do things differently there, but unless you squinch your eyes and imagine the clarinet glissando into Gershwin's plaintive rhapsody... New York throbs not so much with excitement but more like the paper thin skin that tops a throbbing-fat boil.

It's old news.

GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D Mk.II,  EF-S17-85mm, ISO 1500, Hand held. Post processing in PS CC 2019. Multiple layers/liquify filters/brushes - custom tools. Tried not to just grab NYC's searing glare and smell, but its bends-making density, and the cacophonic din as well. 

NYC: 5th Ave. At Central Park

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Consensus disciplines perception

Perception focuses judgment

Judgment triggers conviction

Conviction colors streets nasty.

Found on July 12th 2012 as I walked along 5th Avenue.

Canon 7D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), PS4: Topaz Adjustment, Custom texture, AlienSkinExposure 4: Color Films – Polaroid/faded-darkened, Snap Art Blow Up 3 (300% enlargement). Custom spot-applied color shift adjustment layers, original created to be printed at 27" X 36".

Crayon New York City °1

In high July color

Bubbles and melts.

Like flamed-plastic toys.

Like feeling-seared film.

I walked through New York’s mid-day tropics… Storing stuff in my memory-bin that’s marked Summer In The City. I found new image puddles – left out in the noon-day sun – that melted right over those I’d stored in that bin before. These new ones were like casings to harden around stacked feelings that burble and glow when I poke around for memories of city summer.

Crayoned Impressionism: Canon 7D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), PS4: Two square details carved from a 3 panel vertical pano, Topaz Adjustment, AlienSkinExposure 4: Color Films - Polaroid/faded-darkened, Snap Art3: Crayon. Custom spot-applied color shift adjustment layers, original created to be printed at 30" X 60".

City V Townspeople?

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There's a difference

Between city and

Townspeople.

Their waking hours.

Peach Spa

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We look
For hooks
To which
We Can
Hang an
Order,
A map,
An under
Standing.

NYNY
Canon 7D

Canon 7D, NYNY

Summer Drummer

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Summer in the city... THE BIG CITY! It's a Tuesday during business hours. Central Park's an office... a BIG OFFICE. And it's close to millions of customers. Just a phone call away. If you're good on the phone, Central Park's a good place to work. Especially if your shoes are shined laser bright.

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Used my Canon G10 last week. It's small, inconspicuous, and quiet. Good thing, since I'm none of those things.

Quartet

Perkins, Cash, Elvis, & Jerry Lee

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Tuesday was our 42nd anniversary. I took Rita to NYC to see The MillionDollar Quartet. It's the romanticized story of the legendary 1956 reunion night in Sam Phillip's Sun Records. Apparently it really happened and the tape's finally been made into an album of Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis jamming in front of the live mics. The story goes that it was the evening when Cash and Perkins told Phillips they were not going to renew their contracts.

The story's a thin reed to showcase actually five featured musicians and two backup players. How good is it? They made Rita scream when they whipped the audience into leaping frenzy. This is Broadway where America's very best theatrical talent work. If these people want to ignite a frenzy over a floor sweep... that audience will frenzy.

The five principals: Levi Kreis (Jerry Lee), Robert Britton Lyons (Carl Perkins), Lance Guest (Johnny Cash), Elizabeth Stanley (a fictional PC correct female edition) - and to a lesser extent Eddie Clendening (Elvis) are more electric than their amplifiers. Imagine the best concert you've seen - but stage it by top broadway directors, producers, lighters, sound engineers, and designers. Put it into a relatively small theater where every sight line is perfect... And you will get a sense of this thing.

Some months ago we enjoyed Jersey Boys on Broadway. This is its equal. It does not matter whether you like or hate rock-a-billy music. The theatricality of all of this is designed to slam you breathless. In fact, the last quarter of the show happens as a reprise. At a certain point, they drop all pretense of a drama, turn the stage into a concert hall, face the audience, and crank up the energy level to 11.

It is full frontal Broadway. BTW, the audience seemed to be wildly intergenerational. We were not the oldest couple and way far from the youngest. Its worth a trip to NYC. And, oh yeah. I booked the entire trip (except for Amtrak) through Broadway.com. We stayed at the Times Square Hilton, ate at Maison, and got center section, second row mezzanine seats (my favorite place to watch) from the company which I've used before and will exclusively use again.

It was a wonderful anniversary. Don't wait for your 42nd... call Broadway.com now (an unpaid testimonial). :-)

We've Been Walloped!

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Watched the vital signs today. Saw the world's financial markets wobbling. Watched the Euro's value reflect the astonishing amount of sovereign debt that EU countries will have to refinance over the next three months (who's left to buy?). Winced when the May US employment figures came in at disastrous levels and the unemployment rates declined only because large lumps of the American workers became so discouraged that they abandoned seeking work. Yeah, the way BP keeps pissing into the Gulf, and how Obama's "taking charge" by talking tough about that company's advertising and dividend payments - tough about things that will do nothing about the gunk vomiting up under the sea. Yeah, that's melancholic static.

But this is small stuff. The reeeely scary news came earlier in the week and the word's only just digesting the kernel of universal instability it revealed. Forget the trembling Middle East, pirates off of Africa, or the sabers rattling in Iran and North Korea. No... no... ultimately the most unsettling announcement... The one that makes us wonder if we can believe in any human decision... That news hit us with real wallop when we learned of the breakup between Al and Tipper.

Is there nothing solid left? Is it all dissolving?

Hangin In Manhattan

Guess where I was last night... K?
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Pretty Enough?

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In BigTown pretty is just a spiked-heel in the door.

Screened

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Sculptor Alberto Giacometti wrote, "One never sees things. One sees them through a screen." He argued that the image held primacy over the existence it was supposed to depict.

I take photographs, not so much to remember where I've been, but to discover it. My scan of a moment which will never come again is infinitely inferior to my camera's scan of that same instant. Later I can study it through a different lens... the lens of my emotions and feelings which I can focus infinitely tighter than the distractions of the original moment allowed me to do. There, in my studio, I can find in the image shiny details which come together to form conclusions that were simply not obvious at the 'real' instant.

There is so much more in a photo than in memory. And so much more that imagination can do with that memory when it's discovered for the first time in a quiet study of its photograph.

***

I had the Giacometti quote in mind as I prowled Manhattan soooo.... Pre-Processing: Last week in Times Square. Usually we look to the Times triangular building from some one or another angle... and we miss the walls to that square. Chris and I ate our lunch from behind one of those windows on second floor of that building up there to the left. And we peered down on the swirls going on below. Then we came out, and I looked back and up... and grabbed four shots for a pano.Post-Processing: I had Photoshop CS4 stitch together the pano using the power of its 'collage' layout option with which I deliberately created a tumbling effect. Then I stitched them together again using the 'cylindrical' option which allowed me to tease out the central building as the star of this trio. I added palette and a sky from Cape Cod. I used Topaz in part to dramatize some elements and the Oil painting option (carefully applied in stroked layers) to the scene all around the central building to drop them back and to allow that central building to pop. Of course there is considerable detailed work with the dynamic range. As usual, my final file for this image is about a gigabyte. I'm a storage hog.

The City Rocks - Hot

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Heat’s come back to the East Coast. The city’s are searing but they keep coming atcha’. Throb and temperature wind together like hair in a braid. Summer cities aren’t a support system for life… it’s the other way around.

Cities get like chewy stuff inside of a Tootsie Pop… A gooey pay-off when the coating cracks under the scurrying thrump-bump atop the super seared shell.

Watch it shimmy in the back-beat of a zillion earbuds plugged through the sweat
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Pre processing in Manhattan on 42nd street through my 40d's EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5). And post? Howzabout some Bokeh, swirlled around in Topaz after a lot of careful mixing in CS-4.
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I stood there years ago… High August… Air thick like a stagnant puddle… A nearby boom box LOUD…
Billy Idol … Hot In The City
Throbbing… EVERY – THING!!!!
Like that up there…

What happened to Billy Idol?

Gamin In The City

Made For Each Other

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Sometimes I seem to notice that even the most majestic image is background to something else that's swirling around in my mind. Of course I don't know what. But that's what I love about the artistic process. It mixes epiphany with discovery. The first capture creates a question, a puzzle which may stay with me for a year or more. Oh, not top-of-mind, but just nagging like a quietly yipping puppy just beneath my level of total consciousness.

That was the case here as this capture of 42nd street in New York which from the moment I framed it seemed to be part of a story arc. So when I saw this beautiful child at a street festival.... "CLICK"!

Made for each other...

**

Here are the two most significant components of Gamin In The City. The first is 42nd Street in New York taken on an August afternoon.
The second was taken at the Mushroom Festival in Kennet Square, Chester County, PA a month later. It occurred to me as I took the second picture that it would be a perfect compliment to my New York street series. I tried to replicate the back light as much as possible and used a similar ISO (200).

However the first image was taken through my 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5), and the second through my new 70-300mm, So I made every effort at the time of the second image capture so that they would seamlessly flow into the depth of field created by the ultra-wide, while reinforcing a certain mystical quality with repsect to perspective. Something which the viewer would subliminally notice.

Geek Stuff: 42nd & Broadway

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Here's 42nd Street & Broadway at 1:06 pm last wednesday. These are almost straight images from my new 40D shot full frame. I purposely aimed almost into the sun to see how the dynamic range would hold together. The camera raw processor in Photoshop CS3 automatically diddles with the histogram a touch... otherwise these are virgin images shot with my Canon 10-22mm at f9, 1/200, at 10mm.

There's lots of detail, nice contrast, hot color and plenty of dynamic range. Oh... I did use a polarizing filter which may have fed the camera flare a bit. I've got mixed emotions about filters on lenses. The engineers who designed these optics did not leave room in their equations for an additional piece of glass to be mounted micrometers in front of their lens array. So any filter will degrade... it has to. I'm always amazed by people who will buy expensive glass then mount a cheap UV filter "for protection" at the tip of the lens. How often have you scratched a lens, particularly when you use a lens shade? In fifty years of image taking I have never scratched a lens. So unless I need to add an effect, I won't use a filter.

Polarizing is an effect that needs adding. So, to get that deep color boost and flare reduction from a PF, I make the compromise. Actually the thing is doubly messed up by the way a polarizing filter works. You've got to twirl it, and that means getting finger prints on the front of the filter.. which further degrades the optics. Sigh....

All of that said, the images here are adequately sharp at 200 ISO. I still haven't mastered the metering of this new camera body, so I set the metering mode to partial for the day last Wednesday, I have to read the manual. I understand that the 40D has a true spot metering capacity which the 20D lacked. This should be a useful feature.

Okay, any comments?

Vanishing Point

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I'm wondering whether many of the artists I admire have a novel way of seeing, or whether they see novel things. Of course, that makes me wonder just what novelty is. There are people who say that novelty is indivisible from creativity, and that creativity is indistinguishable from art.

Now we know that things get complicated by the simultaneous combination of gargantuan and tiny things together in cities. Look, take a picture of say, a majestic mountain and you limit what you present to us to the mountain, a sky, and perhaps some framing foreground. Whatever... the image is about mountain.

Now, walk around New York City and you just don't see a single mountain sitting there. It's the complexity of things that tumble into the vanishing point which make cities improbably novel. Their order comes from a disorderly jumble of stuff. I guess the pattern of a city comes from a kind of lack of pattern of objects plopped together over years by individuals.

Cities are a blurred tapestry of egos.

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As requested: Here's the virgin image direct from my FlashCard. Comments anyone?

BTW: To browse my entire blog just click here.

Colored Shadows

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How much of nighttime’s life
Is arranged by cities
To happen in public
And lit to be not only
Felt, scented, and heard
But seen in color?

Sealed inside by night and winter
Suburban people
See little beyond
The inside’s reflections
On their windows
After sunset.

In New York City
At night outside
You squint.

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GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, 1:22 AM: Lens 10-22mm, Focal Length: 16mm, Exp 1/80@f/3.5, ISO 800, Metering Mode: Pattern, Exposure bias -0.67, Camera RAW

Again remember that I do not work with a tripod. Too cumbersome for me. Another reason I prefer wide glass. To each his own, eh?

Angels Play

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Perhaps someday I'll be able to find "WOW!" in another mountain vista. Michael Kimmelmen in The Accidental Masterpiece writes, "We are programmed now to expect awe in certain circumstances, and are therefore doomed to be disappointed when, invitably, we don't feel it."

I grow agape not at wind swept rocky peaks, but ones built by us. And New York City is all about what America once was about... BIG. It is large, robust, and muscular. It's buildings are comic-book brawny. When I think of Manhattan I think of structures which seem to hit their vanishing points before they get to their roofs. They puncture the sky, and sometimes even make it storm. And yet, people who live in cities like Lancaster, or New York... we don't look up. What happens to us, happens at street level. We have to be reminded about what's up there. Reminded to look at our vertical histories. And when we do, like tourists - we find a "WOW!" in the eye-poppingly, almost unnaturally gorgeous things that soar unsettling above our heads. Things which reach where angels play.

Prying Into Oysters

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Michael Kimmelman in his book, "The Accidental Masterpiece" argues that art has a higher purpose than just satisfying the senses. What he's tossing about is the idea that the philosopher David Hume proposed that beauty in art, as opposed to finding beauty naturally in a radiant vista, is dependent on reasoning and critical analysis. People may come around to seeing beauty in art through reasoned argument.

See, if you just look at something, these guys are thinking, and you go, "WOW!" well... you might be seeing something that's just stuck to the surface and it might be shallow. Beauty in art they figure is not solely decorative, nor is it there because the colors of the painting go with the couch. It should have a higher rational for being in art. Beauty in art has a function. A reason for being there. And we frequently have to work to pull it out. Coming at art without thinking is like going after the oyster without tools to tear at the shell.

So, thinking all those deep thoughts... I created this image from my trip to NYC last month. I wasn't after grandeur, or might. I just wanted to see if I could describe what people did to this spot of land. What I feel that people did to it. And since I am the world's greatest expert on my opinion about anything. Well here it is. Y'goddaproblem widdat?

Grand Whirl

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Bustle is what you think about when you think of Metropolis. And an epicenter of bustle is Grand Central Station. How to get that across in the middle of a grey day? And how to portray the abstract concept of busy-ness without losing the sense of New York City? Easy... get a taxi in the image, right?
So? How my doing?

Jersey Boys

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Forget... That's what you do when you haven't been to Broadway for some time. You forget that there's a filtration process and that the people whose product arrives on these stages are the very best that the American theater's got. The writers, directors, producers, musicians, and actors are all at the peak of their crafts and of their careers. So it comes as a startling astonishment to the people like me who get here every few years ... at just how good these people are.
Jersey Boys is about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It won the awards last year. So these are the best of the best who are working just now. The audience went panty-throwing nuts. Women were hooting, men were shouting, the place rocked. See the way this image explodes! Imagine the pounding melody behind it. And then listen for thousands of hands clapping, and their owners standing up and screaming. You don't have to imagine this... I was one of them. It is that good. This time, I'll try not to forget.